I've often referred to myself as a "cynic," but I am a total amateur compared to a professional cynic such as Gore Vidal. I find myself in agreement with a whole lot of what he has to say below.
Amy Goodman recently interviewed Vidal...and here are some excerpts...AMY GOODMAN: I asked him (Vidal) for his thoughts on this election year and on the last eight years of George W. Bush in the White House.
GORE VIDAL: Well, it isn’t over yet. You know, he could still blow up the world. There’s every indication that he’s still thinking about attacking Iran: ‘And the generals are now reporting that the Iran are a great danger and their weapons are being used to kill Americans.’
I mean, you know, I think, quite rightly, the Bushites think that the American people are idiots. They don’t get the point to anything. There are two good reasons for this, is the public educational system for people, kids without money, let’s say, to put it tactfully, is one of the worst in the first world. It’s just terrible. And they end by knowing no history, certainly no American history. I didn’t mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I’d rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.
AMY GOODMAN: You wrote United States of Amnesia. Why?
GORE VIDAL: That’s a good title. You must remember, this is a people that has no culture, that has never had one. After all, I was first published when I was nineteen, and the first time I was a bestseller I was twenty-one, twenty-two. I thought by the time I’m old, this place is going to be greatly improved, not just because I was around, but I was going to contribute to it. But then I saw how the New York Times had blocked in their little tight world of New York publishing, which they really did to publish each other’s books. The results have not been very good.
AMY GOODMAN: You wrote two books during the Bush administration. Two of the books you’ve written are Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War. Why these two?
GORE VIDAL: Well, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, that’s my main book during that period. That was the foreign policy of the Bush administration: perpetual war. This was also Harry Truman’s dream. He started the Cold War. If any history had been imparted to our people, they’d know all this. And if you think I enjoy having to be the one to tell them about it, I don’t.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about Dreaming War?
GORE VIDAL: Well, same thing. They were dreaming war. You can see little Bush all along was just dreaming of war, and also Cheney dreaming about oil wells and how you knock apart a country like Iraq and of course their oil will pay for the damage you do. For that alone, he should have been put in front of a firing squad.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe in the death penalty?
GORE VIDAL: No. But in their case, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, here we are, moved into the sixth year of the war with Iraq, longer than the US was involved in World War II.
GORE VIDAL: Yes, incredible. That was such a huge operation on two great continents against two modern enemies. And we’re fighting little jungle wars for no reason, because we have a president who knows nothing about anything. He’s just blank. But he wants to show off: ‘I’m a wartime president! I’m a wartime president!’ He goes yap, yap, yap. He’s like a crazed terrier. And look where he got us.
I didn’t realize—I think I’ve always had a good idea about my native land, but I didn’t think that institutionally we were so easy to overthrow, because it was a coup d’etat, 9/11. The whole went crashing. And when we got rid of—when they got rid of Magna Carta, I thought, well, really, this wasn’t much of a republic to begin with.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, Magna Carta?
GORE VIDAL: Well, you know what Magna Carta means?
AMY GOODMAN: Explain it.
GORE VIDAL: Tell your readers, your viewers. It’s the basis of our law. Out of it comes the whole theory, practice, on which our—certainly judicial system is based: due process of law. You cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, because that is a right, constitutional right. And that is—I mean, every proper American, that’s graved on his psyche, certainly was on mine. There wasn’t a day passed—I was brought up by my grandfather in Washington—hardly a day passed that he didn’t want to talk about due process. And he was blind from the age of ten.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re also cousins with another Gore: Al Gore.
GORE VIDAL: True.
AMY GOODMAN: What is your assessment of what happened in 2000?
GORE VIDAL: He was robbed. I don’t know him. I never see him. But within the family, I gather it was a great shock to him. He did everything right in life. He was the good boy and loved the Supreme Court and went by the rule of law, due process and everything. And then the Supreme Court bites him in the throat, because they have a lot of crooks on it. And I watched the Dred Scalia the other day on television. Did you see him?
AMY GOODMAN: No.
GORE VIDAL: Oh, he was saying, “Get over it! Just get over it!” He was talking to the liberals, and you know what awful people they are—and about 2000, about the interference of the Court in a national election, which is unheard of. It’s not their job. They’re not even supposed to be referees. They’re just—they’re doing something else. And he was a snarling: “Get over it! Get over it!” I felt, go back to Little Italy, you know? It’s a type I know very well from Naples.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, Gore Vidal, when you say you think what happened after 9/11 was a coup?
...GORE VIDAL: Yeah. So the coup d’etat comes out of this. They saw their chance. They—Cheney, Bush—they wanted the war. They’re oilmen. They want a war to get more oil. They’re also extraordinarily stupid. These people don’t know anything about anything. But they have this—there’s a thick piece of—sheet of—a thick series of actions to be taken, among others—I think one of them was to lock up every person of color in the United States in order to protect us from the enemy within. It was evil stuff. So they latched onto that. I guess Mr. Gonzales was already in place by then. And that was the coup d’etat. They seized the state. And from that moment on, they were appointing all the judges, they were doing this, they were doing that, they got rid of Magna Carta—I will not explain what that is a second time—and they broke the republic.
AMY GOODMAN: How did we get to be so hated, Gore Vidal?
GORE VIDAL: Well, there are many odious traits that Americans have that the rest of the world doesn’t like. Constant boasting with not much to boast about, that gets on other people’s nerves. The idea that, somehow or other, the whole world belongs to us and everybody should do what we tell them to do, they don’t really like that. Weird, but they don’t. There has never been a people less suited for world dominion than the Americans of the twentieth century and twenty-first century.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think Iraq saved Latin America? We’re seeing a major shift in Latin America.
GORE VIDAL: Well, I’m something of a fan of Chavez. He’s just what certainly Venezuela needed, and he’s continuing in a sense the reforms of Castro. But you must remember, I know too much about media to be taken in by anything that most people read about Castro. “He’s got people in prison!” But yeah, a lot of rich people lost their money, and they’re very angry, so they exaggerate his crimes. But he never came up with Abu Ghraib. We did that, because we were fighting for democracy everywhere. So important to bring all this League of Nations together.
Now, any dum-dum president—this is a guy who could not be a freshman at Swarthmore. His brain’s too feeble. There’s no information in his head. To take him seriously is the biggest insult to the American people. He should not have been president. It’s fascinating. You remember when his father broke down in tears on television?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
GORE VIDAL: Well, it was guilt. It was intended by that not-particularly-royal family that Jeb, Governor—by then Governor of Florida, would run for president in that slot when W. ran. And Jeb would be easily elected. He’s an intelligent person and a source of pride for the Bush family. Then little—the black prince breaks out of order and goes after it and gets it. And that’s what you saw the father weeping. This was Shakespearean, this collision. And old Bush was historical. I’ve never seen a grown man so out of control, and one who’s used to television. And there he was, and they couldn’t stop him, because he was praising Jeb for all of his good qualities, and as he was doing it, it was all coming back to him, ironically, and he’s the one who should be president. Let’s hope one of my atavars will make a play out of that.
AMY GOODMAN: Will you write more about Bush?
GORE VIDAL: Of course not. I’ve written too much already. I mean, it’s a non-subject.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to happen right now?
GORE VIDAL: It’s happened. We’re broke. Do you follow television, as they find out we’re running out of food? That’s never happened in my lifetime.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think there’s a way to fix this?
GORE VIDAL: A crash will do it. But that’s pretty extreme.
AMY GOODMAN: For people who say there needs to be a New Deal today, what do you say to them? What does that mean?
GORE VIDAL: Well, I don’t want to—we don’t need another repetition of the original New Deal, which is economically structuring, but if we had something like that—or we may need something like that because of the mess—it’s going to take two generations to undo the mess of the Bush people. Too much has been damaged. Too much is now—just look at the judicial system. Look at these, you know, judges they’ve been appointing. No, the power was seized using the 9/11 adventure as a cause to overthrow the government of the United States, and it was overthrown.
And was any voices raised against it? The first one was Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. So I wrote that one, because I was seventy, and I didn’t want to sit down and do a whole batch of political books, but there was no choice. So I wrote that first to try and explain who the enemy was. Every time I hear “Islam” or “terrorism is on the march”—
AMY GOODMAN: Or “Islamofascists”?
GORE VIDAL: Oh, “Islamofascist,” the phrase makes no sense. How can a non-Italian be a fascist? It never spread that far. The stupidest group of people that I have ever seen in public office are in it, have been in it for the last ten years, whatever. They don’t know anything. And you can see, when George Bush is trying to read his notes—“Well, we’re trying to protect the Grecians who are on the march. No, I mean, it’s the Turks. We’re having problems with Turkey. Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah.” And when Americans don’t know stupid people, the country is out of business.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you want to be remembered?
You can read the entire transcript or view the video here.
It's pretty sad to see the all crap that Bush has wrought while President. What's even sadder is when you come across people who still think Bush is a good guy, and a smart guy who's done a good job as President, and, besides, the Democrats are worse. Argh. Oy. I'm not sure America is going to "make it."
